In his latest column Cecil talks about paedophilia using statistics presumably from the US.
See http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3097/how-common-is-pedophilia
When one stretches the net slightly larger to include South Africa you discover a massive difference.
According to reports, 25% of South African Schoolgirls are HIV positive. Presumably from sexual contact. This is compared to 4% of boys.
See
[QUOTE=Cecil]
Pedophilia is defined as persistent sexual attraction to children where the perpetrator is at least age 16 and the victim is at least five years younger.
[/QUOTE]
I’m far too lazy to look up the clinical definition of pedophilia, but Cecil’s strikes me as ludicrous. By that metric a 22 year old person who finds 17 year old “children” attractive qualifies as a pedophile.
Here’s the wiki entry (which is drawing from DSM - a good source). I think Cecil was using the same source, but omitted a pertinent portion:
The portion being the part about the child in question being aged 13 or below. This, when combined with the need for a 5 year age gap and the perpetrator being 5 years older, makes sense (and addresses the point raised by JL).
Yeah, Cecil is blending in statutory rape of postpubescent minors which muddies the waters. Older teens who are still minors have adult features (e.g., developed breasts for women and facial hair for men). Thus, it is not disordered to find them sexually attractive like it would be for prepubescent children.
It is however, illegal for an adult to actually engage them in sexual activities (with exceptions for lowered ages of consent and short age differences granted by some states). That is a power issue, not a disordered sexuality issue. The state assumes that adults having sex with postpubescent minors involves some sort of coercion, even if that coercion is just psychological or social. And so, it is criminalized (as it should be since it’s also unethical precisely because of the power differential).
Where this latter situation might be psychologically disordered is if an adult purposely preys on the naivete and the power differential for sexual gratification; or if they are incapable of sustaining healthy and sexual relationships with other adults and so turn to postpubescent teens for their social, emotional, and sexual desires. But that’s not pedophilia, it’s adolescentophilia.
Well sure, you send a bunch of 12-year olds to college and you’re asking for trouble.
Seriously, I’ve read this a dozen times and I can’t figure out who was saying they did what to who when and at what age.
Of the 500 college women in the survey, 4% or 20 reported that at some time in their lives they “had sexual experiences with a child at least five years younger”. The average age that these 20 women had this experience was 12. For example, a 12 year old had a sexual experience with another child 7 or younger.
The range of ages at which these women now in college had these experiences is not given. Presumably the lower limit is 5, since the partner would be 0 at that point. It could involve an older student with a partner as old as 17. However, the presumption is that most were pre-teens partnering with even younger children.
Except a 17 year old is not a child.
Yeah, Cecil’s “definition” that you quoted assumes you’ve already defined “children”; its point is to rule out those who are themselves children from being considered pedophiles.
That is certainly a frightening and unfortunate statistic, but it doesn’t necessarily bear on rates of pedophilia. There is a confounding factor that many uneducated people in South Africa believe that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Thus men with AIDS seeking out sex with young girls, not necessarily because they prefer young girls, but simply to secure a virgin.
The power dynamic also fosters seeking out victims of opportunity over preference.
There was supposed to be something in there about pedophilia involving prepubescent children. Somehow it got left out. I’ll fix, but the Master is going to be very, very cross.
It seemed a little strange to me to start off the column with the conclusion that the situation is “pretty bad”, when it then goes on to show that we actually have no idea because all the data available is pretty unreliable.
The U.S. population at the moment is 313 million. 1% of that 3+ million; one-third of 1% is 1 million. These numbers are at the bottom of what admittedly is an enormously wide range. We were of the view that they nonetheless qualified as pretty bad.
To me, the most striking thing about the column is the sober and tasteful nature of Mr. Signorino’s accompanying illustration. I imagine it must have taken Slug a painful amount of restraint to keep the drawing as subdued as it is, given the subject matter. My hat is off to him.
In the United States a 17 year old is legally a child. 
Thank you. Feel free to instruct him to direct his wrath at me.
I think Cheryl44 is making a distinction between a legal minor and a prepubescent. Admittedly word usage can be murky.
I mean, technically, I am my parents’ child, but I am 41. Depending on the context, that word is appropriate or ridiculous. Similarly the juxtaposition between a 17 year old as a minor not adult but not pre-teen.
Of course she is; I’m not a complete idiot.
English is my first language, thanks. Do you not understand that this was my original point? It doesn’t matter now as the article has been amended for clarity.
I am impressed – unfavorably – by the use of surveys of college undergraduates. This isn’t Cecil’s fault. The physically and intellectually lazy procedure of surveying your own students is so widespread that professors actually pretend that it produces real science. It doesn’t. Probability theory cannot be applied to convenience collections. Applying statistics to the first 200 students who fail to run away fast enough only tell you about those 200 students. Those statistics don’t even say anything about the 200 students who managed to duck out of the professor’s crazy survey. (Except they are likely smarter than the selected bunch.)
In this case, it probably shows that eight male undergraduates put down the most crudely ludicrous response they could think of in order to mess with the professor’s head.
But this sort of pseudo-scientific quackery has real-world impact. I just read an article in which the writer tries to lessen the Catholic Church’s sex scandal by citing a careful study of the church’s clerics that put pedophilia at 4%. The justification was that this was merely what you’d expect, given the 4% level of pedophilia in the general population, as determined by eight self-reports by male undergraduates. Nothing to see here – move along.
For me, 4% seems 'way too high. Isn’t this claiming that pedophiles outnumber Mormons 2:1? Wouldn’t that imply that we’ve had two pedophile presidential candidates?
No, it wouldn’t. After a certain number of trials, we could reasonably expect that we’d draw a paedophile if picking people at random from the general population, but that’s not how presidents are selected. For one, there is considerable scrutiny as to the past of a candidate and a paedophile is unlikely to desire that attention.
Self reports are problematic (and selection bias is one of those issues), but there are methods of accounting for selection bias: comparing prosecution data with self reports is one. Another control is the use of social desirability scales. Opportunity samples can be used to guide further research. For instance, Zimbardo’s prison experiment (originally conducted with, IIRC, white male American students) was replicated by Haslam and Reicher in 2002.
The alternatives are administering self reports to a random sample (which will still suffer from non-response bias and other issues associated with self reports) or relying on prosecution data alone, which we can be reasonably certain does not give a valid indication of extant levels of paedophilia (former victims may take decades to bring allegations to light). It’s neither practical nor ethical to force people to answer questions about paedophilic tendencies, nor to observe the abuse of children for research purposes.
Police reports are obviously unrepresentative, but they can provide a minimum number.
I just found Children, some aged five, commit thousands of child sex offences.
You can’t extrapolate those numbers to the entire population given the incomplete information, but young child on younger child abuse certainly happens.
I suspect that extending the definition of “prepubescent” to include children as old as 13 is simply an acknowledgement that sometimes puberty hits later. Basically, pedophilia is specifically the attraction to prepubescence, something you can’t assign a specific age to, since it’s a varying biological process (it happens when it happens), not a legal demarcation (today at 17 years 364 days of age, you’re a child, tomorrow you’re an adult).